Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware

As the war for creating customized AI hardware heats up, Google announced at Google I/O 2018 that is rolling out out its third generation of silicon, the Tensor Processor Unit 3.0. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the new TPU is eight times more powerful than last year, with up to 100 petaflops in performance. Google joins pretty much every other major company in looking to create custom silicon in order to handle its machine operations. And while multiple frameworks for developing machine learning tools have emerged, including PyTorch and Caffe2, this one is optimized for Google's TensorFlow. Google is looking to make Google Cloud an omnipresent platform at the scale of Amazon, and offering better machine learning tools is quickly becoming table stakes.